# 1820 Presidential Election [[James Monroe]]'s reelection — effectively unopposed. The Federalist Party did not nominate a candidate; Monroe received 231 of 232 electoral votes cast. The single dissenting electoral vote was cast by New Hampshire elector William Plumer for [[John Quincy Adams]] — by long-standing legend, to preserve Washington's record as the only unanimously-elected president, though Plumer's own writings suggest he was actually expressing dissatisfaction with Monroe's policies. The election conventionally anchors the "**Era of Good Feelings**" — a misleadingly placid label for a period that contained the Panic of 1819, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the early sectional rupture over slavery that would dominate American politics for the next 40 years. ## Result - **[[James Monroe]]** (Democratic-Republican) — 231 electoral votes - **[[John Quincy Adams]]** (Democratic-Republican) — 1 electoral vote - Total: 232 electoral votes ## Right-wing relevance The 1820 election's right-wing relevance is structural rather than ideological. The collapse of two-party competition that produced this near-unanimous result was unstable — the Democratic-Republican Party would itself fracture in 1824 into the Jacksonian and National-Republican factions, producing the Second Party System (Whigs vs. Democrats) by the mid-1830s. The 1820 single-party moment is one of the historical exceptions to the otherwise-continuous two-party structure of American politics; contemporary commentators occasionally invoke it in discussions of whether the current two-party structure might dissolve. ## Connections - [[James Monroe]] — Reelected nearly unanimously. - [[John Quincy Adams]] — The single dissenting electoral vote; would win the contested 1824 election. ---